Obama seeks study on local leaders for troop decision

AFGHAN PROVINCES TO BE ANALYZED

Details should help president determine need

By Scott Wilson and Greg JaffeWashington

Post Staff Writers

Thursday, October 29, 2009

President Obama has asked senior officials for a province-by-province analysis of Afghanistan to determine which regions are being managed effectively by local leaders and which require international help, information that his advisers say will guide his decision on how many additional U.S. troops to send to the battle.
Obama made the request in a meeting Monday with Vice President Biden and a small group of senior advisers helping him decide whether to expand the war. The detail he is now seeking also reflects the administration's turn toward Afghanistan's provincial governors, tribal leaders and local militias as potentially more effective partners in the effort than a historically weak central government that is confronting questions of legitimacy after the flawed Aug. 20 presidential election.
"This is obviously a complicated security environment in Afghanistan, and the president wants the clearest possible understanding of what the challenges are to our forces and what is required to meet that challenge," said a senior administration official who has participated in the Afghanistan policy review and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it. "Any successful and sustainable strategy must clearly align the resources we provide with the goals we are trying to achieve."
As U.S. forces in Afghanistan endure the deadliest month of the eight-year-old conflict, Obama is weighing a request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, for a quick jump in forces to blunt the Taliban's momentum against concerns that too many new troops could help the insurgency's recruiting efforts.
Administration officials say that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and national security adviser James L. Jones, a retired four-star general, support Obama's request for a more detailed status report on each province that could identify potential U.S. allies among Afghanistan's local leaders, some with less-than-sterling human rights records.
Gates and Jones have pushed McChrystal to justify as specifically as possible his request for 44,000 additional troops, the figure now at the center of White House deliberations. The review group once included intelligence officials, generals and ambassadors, but it has recently narrowed to a far smaller number of senior civilian advisers, including Biden, Gates, Jones, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Administration officials said the province-by-province analysis will be ready for Obama before his scheduled Friday meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the White House.
"There are a lot of questions about why McChrystal has identified the areas that he has identified as needing more forces," said a senior military official familiar with the review, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the deliberations candidly. "Some see it as an attempt by the White House to do due diligence on the commander's troop request. A less charitable view is that it is a 5,000-mile screwdriver tinkering from Washington." A range of options
The weeks-long White House review has been shaped by a central tension between the broad counterinsurgency strategy endorsed by the military and a narrower counterterrorism campaign against al-Qaeda that some senior administration officials favor.
McChrystal, who took command of the 100,000 U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan in May, is promoting a plan that calls for concentrating forces around urban areas to better protect the Afghan population and pulling back from remote regions. His idea calls for speeding the training of Afghan forces, expanding civilian efforts to improve Afghan governance and starting other long-term programs to win the support of the population that the insurgency draws from.
About half the 44,000 troops McChrystal requested would be sent to take back Taliban sanctuaries in southern Afghanistan. The others would push into western Afghanistan, where the U.S. military has only a slight presence, and reinforce operations in the mountainous east. One brigade would train Afghan army and police forces.
Even after weeks of review, administration officials say a range of options is still under consideration, including whether additional U.S. forces could be deployed in phases. Although Obama had been expected to announce his decision before leaving Nov. 11 on a 10-day trip to Asia, administration officials say he may wait until he returns.
"I think it's important to hear and to get this right," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Wednesday.
In reviewing McChrystal's bracing assessment of the war, the president and his senior advisers have concluded that the Taliban cannot be eliminated as a military and political force, regardless of how many more troops are deployed.
The acknowledgment is behind Obama's request for an analysis of which of Afghanistan's 34 provinces can be left to local leaders, perhaps including elements of the Taliban unaligned with al-Qaeda. Administration officials have said that under any strategy, the Taliban would not be allowed to threaten the Kabul government or provide sanctuary for al-Qaeda, whose leaders operate largely from the tribal areas across the border in Pakistan.
"How much of the country can we just leave to be run by the locals?" said one U.S. official involved in Afghanistan policy, who discussed the White House request on the condition of anonymity. "How do you separate those who have taken up arms because they oppose the presence of foreigners in their area, because they're getting paid to fight us because we're there, from those who want to restore a Taliban government? How many of the people who we're fighting actually share al-Qaeda's ideology?"
Obama's interest in provincial allies also reflects the administration's growing disenchantment with President Hamid Karzai and his inability to extend his government's authority beyond Kabul during his nearly eight years in office. Provincial governments and tribal structures have long exerted more power than the central government, which many Afghans view as remote, corrupt and ineffective. Another U.S. official involved in Afghanistan policy said, "Most of Afghanistan that's stable is under local control."
"The question is: Can you get benign local control in more places?" the official said. "And will that be easier to achieve, and more effective, than trying to establish more central government control?" Refining a strategy
Critics of ceding authority to local power brokers point to Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city, where Karzai's brother Ahmed Wali Karzai has been given wide latitude to run the municipality and the surrounding province. Security in the area has deteriorated over the past year, while the cultivation of opium-producing poppies has soared.
Some U.S. and Afghan officials contend that Ahmed Wali, who heads the Kandahar provincial council, has been reluctant to crack down on drug traffickers -- and the Taliban fighters who protect them -- because he is involved in narcotics smuggling, an accusation he has repeatedly denied. The New York Times reported Wednesday that Ahmed Wali has been on the CIA's payroll for much of the past eight years.
"Ahmed Wali illustrates the challenge we face across the country," a senior U.S. official involved in Afghanistan policy said Wednesday. "Do we pay him off to help us -- whatever help that may be -- or is our goal of improving the government more important than doing these kinds of deals?"
Obama is refining his strategy from several options outlined during more than 15 hours of meetings in the White House, administration officials say.
Some White House officials, including Biden, have advocated a strategy that would focus primarily on counterterrorism efforts against al-Qaeda. The vice president has argued for preserving the current U.S. troop level of 68,000, expediting the training of Afghan forces, intensifying Predator drone strikes against al-Qaeda operatives and supporting the Pakistani government against the Taliban within its borders.
But the deepening conflict is complicating those plans. For example, administration officials say that sending additional U.S. training brigades to accelerate preparation of the Afghan security forces may not accomplish as much as hoped because recruitment -- and retention -- has gone poorly as the war intensifies.
"It's all part of the endemic problems of illiteracy and security that plague many countries, but particularly this one," said a senior administration official familiar with the review process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it. "You want to increase the number of people engaged in training, but at some point bringing in more and more Americans won't produce quicker results. There's a ceiling."
McChrystal has advocated something far closer to a nation-building project. Some Republican supporters of the general's plan in Congress have compared his strategy to the 2007 "surge" of U.S. troops in Iraq, a shorter-term effort that helped pull the country back from sectarian civil war.
But administration officials reject the comparison, pointing out that McChrystal's troop request would require a far longer deployment of U.S. forces and that Afghanistan is in a less dire position than Iraq was at the time of the surge.
Most important, administration officials say, the violence in Afghanistan is directed against U.S. forces rather than among Afghans. In Iraq, much of the pre-surge violence involved Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites fighting for control of the state, which gave the U.S. military a clearer role in protecting Iraqi civilians.
"There are some areas of the country that will fight us and fight the Taliban just because we are there," Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, told reporters Wednesday.

Twin majors have leapfrog careers

Twin majors have leapfrog careers
Fort Leavenworth Lamp
By Tisha Johnson Staff WriterPublished: Thursday, September 17, 2009 12:17 PM

Majors Clydellia "Dellia" Prichard-Allen and Clydea "Dea" Prichard-Brown, twins in the Command and General Staff College Intermediate Level Education 2010-01 class, pick up their 3-year-old daughters Kristian Allen and Zaria Brown at the Child Development Center Sept. 1. The twins also have 9-year-old sons, Michael Allen Jr. and Zion Brown. Lamp photo by Prudence Siebert.

Twin sisters currently attending the Command and General Staff College Intermediate Level Education say their lives, including their military careers, have leapfrogged each other through the years.Nicknamed Dea and Dellia, Majors Clydea Prichard-Brown and Clydellia Prichard-Allen, are named after their grandfather, Clyde Keys.The pair graduated a year early from high school. They were attending Mercer University in Macon, Ga., as electrical engineering majors and modeling to help pay for college when Prichard-Allen did something that changed both of their lives - she enlisted in the Army.

The idea of military service was not foreign to the sisters - their mother was in the Women's Army Corps for a year and a half, and they say they have many other members of their extended family who have been in the military.When Prichard-Allen enlisted in the Army Reserve in 1989, her sister resisted."She wasn't so apt to go in, she was modeling still," Prichard-Allen said.

Prichard-Allen said she joined because she discovered the student loan repayment program. Their mother, a single mom, had been helping them pay for college and had used some of her retirement money to do so."I was probably the recruiter's best recruit," Prichard-Allen said."And I was fighting it," Prichard-Brown laughed.

Then, Prichard-Brown said she realized how well the military was treating her sister."I saw she was living so well, the Army was paying for everything, she had her own car ... I was still at home with mom and I said, Yeah, this is what I want,'" Prichard-Brown said.Prichard-Brown enlisted into active duty in 1991. And her sister, who was deployed as part of Desert Storm at the time, decided to stay on active duty after her deployment.

"When she went active duty, I said, 'You know what? I'll go active duty as well,' because I was enjoying it," Prichard-Allen said.Both of the sisters made their way to sergeant and were eligible to be promoted to staff sergeant when they found the Green to Gold program - a year apart.The last to join the Army, Prichard-Brown was the first to receive a scholarship for the program in 1995. She received her commission in 1997, graduating magna cum laude with a degree in criminal justice from Indiana University, Purdue University of Indianapolis. Prichard-Brown was a distinguished military graduate, a George C. Marshall Award recipient and the first minority and first female cadet battalion commander in the history of the school's ROTC program.

Prichard-Allen was awarded a Green to Gold scholarship in 1996 and received her commission in 1998, graduating cum laude with a degree in psychology from South Carolina State University. Prichard-Allen was a distinguished military graduate, a George C. Marshall Award recipient and the first cadet brigade commander for the school's ROTC program, a new position at the school.Wearing the same U.S. Army Central Command combat patch they earned 17 years apart, this is the first time the sisters have been stationed together.Last year Prichard-Brown was scheduled to come to CGSC, but was diverted and deployed to Kuwait. While she was there she knew she was going to be coming to ILE next and called her sister about it.

"So we talked about it. I said, 'Hey, look, I'm going to school. Why don't you go to school?'" Prichard-Brown said. "We hadn't been together in 20 years."Prichard-Brown is here with her husband of 17 years, Rick Brown, her 9-year-old son Zion and 3-year-old daughter Zaria. Her husband, an Army veteran, works for the General Services Adminstration in Kansas City.Prichard-Allen is here with her 3-year-old daughter Kristian. Her husband of 14 years, Sgt. 1st Class Michael Allen, is still stationed in the D.C. area with their 9-year-old son Michael Allen Jr.

The sisters say they did not plan to have their children close together like they did, but like everything else in their lives that have leapfrogged, it was simply coincidence."Our sons are seven months apart and our daughters are five months apart," Prichard-Brown laughed.The sisters said family has always been a driving force in their lives. Like many twins, they said they rely on each other, but their mother and grandparents have also been important in their lives.
Prichard-Allen said their mother has been the rock in their lives. She was a single mother who raised four children. She said they do everything they can to make her proud."She has been the one to actually encourage us to continue," Prichard-Allen said. "She is the backbone for us.""In everything we do," the sisters said in unison.

Prichard-Brown said their mother wanted them to identify with what they wanted to do."We grew up with discipline and leadership," Prichard-Brown said.The sisters say they value their enlisted time in the Army, and their time as noncommissioned officers.In different staff groups at CGSC, the pair say they bring some insight to their groups with their prior service."As leaders we have to understand our Soldiers, so if you were the Soldier at one time ... we are giving them (staff groups) a better insight," Prichard-Brown said.Through the years, they have remained each other's mentors, they said. Prichard-Brown is a logistics officer with almost 17 years of active-duty service. Prichard-Allen is an Adjutant General officer with more than 18 years of service."When I was in command in Alaska, I would call her all the time and say 'What do you think about this?'" Prichard-Allen said. "I would be her sounding board as well."

http://www.ftleavenworthlamp.com/articles/2009/09/17/features/features1.txt

NYT Article: Blogging in the Military

Below is a great article on our military and blogging. Jim Dao points out that we can't seem to get on the same page when operating in the information domain. Some leaders are for blogging and social media outlets while some are against it. As leaders in the Army we tend to get very anxious about those things we cannot control. We immediately put tight control measures on it until we can figure out how to apply appropriate risk mitigation measures to it. Our intentions are in the right place and the protection of our Soldiers and their families is what we believe is at risk.

I found it interesting that in the article Jim notes, "Noah Shachtman, editor of Wired.com’s national security blog, Danger Room, which has reported extensively on the new policy review, said he recently asked students at West Point whether they would allow soldiers to blog. Almost every cadet said no. " Is the right message being taught to our future leaders? Are they feeling the pressures of a "zero defect" area? Are they receiving the same message that we are at the Command and General Staff College that our Chief of Staff has put out on embracing a Culture of Engagement?

I have to agree with "Mud Puppy" (from the article) “I think that people need to hear from us, more than they need to hear from the big whigs. War has a cost, and that cost is paid by soldiers.” As leaders we should embrace this new operating terrain and learn to work inside it instead of avoiding it because it will not go away.

All that being said our guidance to our Soldiers should be; We are professionals all the time. We must ensure that our actions are in line with the Army Values and rules we volunteered to live by. If in fact we step outside those boundaries then we should ready to accept the consequences. If you engage any media outlet and are a member of the Armed Forces you should always be able to put your name next to what you say because you are a professional. We then must be ready as leaders to underwrite their mistakes because they occur.

Thoughts?

MAJ Phil Kiniery

IN, US Army

CGSC SG19A

Pentagon Keeps Wary Watch as Troops Blog

New York Times

By JAMES DAO
Published: September 8, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/us/09milblogs.html?_r=1&adxnnlx=1252584080-vptPSyOQ4tllOV5Lhq5UbQ&pagewanted=all

Over the course of 10 months in eastern Afghanistan, an Army specialist nicknamed Mud Puppy maintained a blog irreverently chronicling life at the front, from the terror of roadside bombs to the tyrannies of master sergeants.

Often funny and always profane, the blog, Embrace the Suck (military slang for making the best of a bad situation), flies under the Army’s radar. Not officially approved, it is hidden behind a password-protected wall because the reservist does not want his superiors censoring it.
“Some officer would be reviewing all my writing,” the 31-year-old soldier, who insisted that his name not be used, said in an e-mail message. “And sooner or later he would find something to nail me with.”

There are two sides to the military’s foray into the freewheeling world of the interactive Web. At the highest echelons of the Pentagon, civilian officials and four-star generals are newly hailing the power of social networking to make members of the American military more empathetic, entice recruits and shape public opinion on the war.
Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of American forces in Iraq, is on Facebook. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, has a YouTube channel and posts Twitter updates almost daily.

The Army is encouraging personnel of all ranks to go online and collaboratively rewrite seven of its field manuals. And on Aug. 17, the Department of Defense unveiled a Web site promoting links to its blogs and its Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube sites.
The Web, however, is a big place. And the many thousands of troops who use blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to communicate with the outside world are not always in tune with the Pentagon’s official voice. Policing their daily flood of posts, videos and photographs is virtually impossible — but that has not stopped some in the military from trying.
The Department of Defense, citing growing concerns about cybersecurity, plans to issue a new policy in the coming weeks that is widely expected to set departmentwide restrictions on access to social networking sites from military computers. People involved with the department’s review say the new policy may limit access to social media sites to those who can demonstrate a clear work need, like public information officers or family counselors.

If that is the case, many officials say, it will significantly set back efforts to expand and modernize the military’s use of the Web just as those efforts are gaining momentum. And while the new policy would not apply to troops who use private Internet providers, a large number of military personnel on bases and ships across the world depend on their work computers to gain access to the Internet.

To many analysts and officers, the debate reflects a broader clash of cultures: between the anarchic, unfiltered, bottom-up nature of the Web and the hierarchical, tightly controlled, top-down tradition of the military.

“We as an institution still haven’t come to grips with how we want to use blogging” and other social media, said Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the commander of the Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

One of the Army’s leading advocates for more open access to the Web, General Caldwell argues that social networking allows interaction among enlisted soldiers, junior officers and generals in a way that was unthinkable a decade ago.

He requires students at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth to blog, and the college now sponsors 40 publicly available blogs, including his own, where policies are freely debated.

But getting approval for those blogs, as well as for YouTube and Facebook access at the college, was a struggle. “At every corner, someone cited a regulation,” General Caldwell said. In recent months, however, “the Army has made quantum leaps” in embracing the Web, he added.

Noah Shachtman, editor of Wired.com’s national security blog, Danger Room, which has reported extensively on the new policy review, said he recently asked students at West Point whether they would allow soldiers to blog. Almost every cadet said no.

“Then I asked, ‘How many of you think you can stop the flow of information from your soldiers?’ ” Mr. Shachtman recalled. “Everybody agreed there is no way to stop this information from going out anyway. So there is this sort of dual-headedness.”

Skeptics of the Pentagon review say it is motivated partly by a desire among certain officials to exert control over the voices of troops on the Web.

Since the advent of military blogging during the Iraq war, some commanders have remained uncomfortable with the art form, citing concerns about both security and decorum.
Over the years, blogs have been censored or shut down, and several years ago the Army instituted requirements that bloggers register with their commanding officers and submit posts for review. As a result, some bloggers say, blogs have become tamer — or, as in the case of Mud Puppy’s blog, gone underground.

Officials knowledgeable about the review say it is a result of growing concerns at the United States Strategic Command, which oversees the military’s use of the Internet, that social networking sites make military computers vulnerable to viruses, hackers, identity thieves, terrorists and even hostile governments. (Those concerns are not focused on the military’s secure system for classified material, which does not use the public Internet.)

The review may already be having a chilling effect. The Marine Corps recently restated a ban on using any social media on its network. And the Army, which in June gave some bases access to Facebook, Twitter and other networking sites, recently urged units to avoid creating new social media pages until the final department policy was issued.

Still, even as they consider restricting the troops’ access to social media, the most senior Pentagon officials have clearly come to view Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogging as crucial elements of their public information operations.

“This department, I think, is way behind our curve” in using social media, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates said in July as he extolled the use of Twitter by Iranian dissidents.

To critics, the Pentagon’s social media sites are goofy at best, propagandistic at worst. “It’s like your parents’ using modern slang and failing miserably,” said Sgt. Selena Coppa, who writes a blog, Active Duty Patriot, which frequently criticizes the Iraq war and, she says, has gotten her into trouble with her superiors.

But to many troops, the deeper question is whether the military will allow personnel in the field to use the sites the Pentagon itself wants to exploit. For a generation raised on the Web, any restrictions will damage morale, those people say.

“What comes out of my blog is the experiences of a soldier right in the middle of all of this,” Mud Puppy (a nickname for military police), who recently returned home to Illinois, wrote in a recent e-mail message. “I think that people need to hear from us, more than they need to hear from the big whigs. War has a cost, and that cost is paid by soldiers.”